It's Friday again here at AtAT (and, uh, probably other places, too), so you know what that means: it's time for another Weekend Brain Teaser! Yes, we know that if it weren't for us, you'd probably spend the weekend using chemical and/or recreational methods to congeal your grey matter into an inert mass of sludge, and since we're firmly committed to the prevention of fun mental atrophy, we've taken it upon ourselves to give you these little cognitive exercises on Fridays to keep your noggins toned and trim until you get back to the office. You'll thank us when you're a humorless retiree full of regret over all those wild weekends of vice and debauchery you missed because you were too busy exercising your frontal lobes with our lovingly supplied mental stumpers. (Well, okay, no you won't-- but we'll pretend you did.)

So without further ado, here's the setup: the folks at MacRumors somehow got their mitts on an internal IBM document describing the relationship between the company's Technology Group and Apple, and how that liaison led to the development of the PowerPC 970 (a.k.a. the G5). There's some good stuff in there, apparently, including the assuring revelation that "IBM has committed to provide several generations of processor development to Apple over the course of five years," but the bit that's relevant to today's exercise actually dishes the dirt on Apple's potential switch to Intel processors. Yes, that again.

According to IBM, Apple had indeed been tossing around the possibility of moving to Macs within which would beat the heart of the mighty Pentium (or whatever), but only as a last resort, Hail Mary-type play, since it was always clear that "using Intel would deeply affect its current customer base"; moving to the x86 platform would force customers to "suffer through a slow transition from PowerPC over the long term." At the heart of that suffering is the cold, hard fact that "every existing Mac program would potentially have to be recompiled to work on an Intel platform," which is something that, amazingly enough, "Apple wanted to avoid." Go figure. Luckily, IBM was up to the challenge, and Apple never had to worry about marketing backwards-incompatible Macs built around chips that Apple itself has repeatedly insisted are slow.

So here's your challenge for the weekend: given this new evidence from Apple's own PowerPC development partner that Apple is well aware that a voluntary switch to Intel is tantamount to platform suicide, construct a scenario of self-delusion and excessive rationalization whereby stalwart devotees of the "Macs on Intel" rumor can keep their faith alive. And no fair simply calling the IBM article (or MacRumors's report on it) a fake-- that's the cheap way out. We expect most plausible scenarios will involve government mind control experiments, an international conspiracy of some sort, a media coverup, several "accidental" deaths, and house pets with radio transmitters implanted in their teeth. (Bonus points if you can work in the phrase "before turning the gun on himself.") Enjoy!